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We were at the Cape last weekend. Around here no one asks -- "Which Cape?" Even people from Cape Neddick know I don’t mean Cape Canaveral or Cape Bretton or Cape Horn. When a New Englander goes to "the Cape", it is always that crooked cranberry-covered peninsula to the South called Cape Cod.

An enormous number of people go to the Cape. Veterans of Cape summers trade war stories about who sat in traffic longest waiting to get over the Bourne or the Sagamore bridge. Half the trip when I was a kid, took place in a crawling line of cars within view of the bridges. For Massachusetts residents, the annual Cape migration is practically required by state law. I spent my first dozen summers at little cottages in the Falmouth area. My wife, brought up in Connecticut, summered at Wellfleet. It was, I assume, all those summers that drove us both to settle in Portsmouth near the sea.

It seems a little redundant now to drive through the heart of Boston and across those mighty bridges and over the canal to see more ocean. Despite our 18 mile coast vs. hundreds of miles of Cape Cod, it seems more crowded thanks to the long wait at the bridge. It seems more commercial too, but isn’t. Where there used to be humble weathered cottages loom mansions. Roadside berry and vegetable stands have become malls. But it is the Cape, after all, and the urge to migrate – if only for a weekend in the Spring – is still strong. The ocean is massive. The sand is endless. The air is more briny. If you drive way up the hook and probe deeper down the side streets, there are still wild places.

As we were getting ready for a quick trip, it occurred to me that not once, not ever, have I explored Cape Cod online.

It’s confusing. In two hours of surfing Google links under "Cape Cod" I never found the ideal homepage. I guess I was hoping to find a single site that told all – a guide to Cape news, travel, history, events, lodging, dining. I was hoping for a central voice, a personality, a sage and witty, native Cape Codder to guide me to the heartland. I imagined a character speaking for the region like the Wizard spoke for Oz. No such luck.

Initial searches turned me over to a range of largely commercial web sites that lacked in spirit what they lacked in data. The Cape is a pretty big place and, like our own seacoast, each town has its own personality as diverse as Woods Hole is from Provincetown. What Plato might have called the essence of "capeness" is largely imaginary, I guess. The icons have all been reduced to bric-a-brac made in China that you buy for 70% off at the Christmas Tree shop. It’s a swirling mix of cliché images – shells, seagulls, lighthouses, pilgrims, sea captains and shipwrecks, craggy bent trees and sandy dune beaches, lobster pot buoys, sailboats, Kennedies, fishermen and of course, weathered capes.

What I was looking for was my grandfather’s camp with the back yard piled high in discarded scallop shells, mucky eel grass and a pebbly dirt road. What I found online were slick pix and real estate rates. Web sites were soft on culture and hard on shopping. Commercially there’s even a Cape Cod Internet Council (www.capeinternet.org) comparable to our eCoast group.

On the positive side, there are a lot of good small web sites being built on Cape Cod. Any place where you get an isolated intelligent population, you get good web content. The meat is in the smaller independent sites rather than the portals. But it can still be confusing. Visitors looking for specific data – places to eat, places to buy crafts, where to surf real waves, parks and picnic spots – will find their answers easily online. Web users quickly seeking first-time generic info have a trickier task. Caperestaurants.com, for example, is actually the Yarmouth Restaurant Association. Many of the portals have spotty data or link only to advertising or member businesses.

Certainly there are great sites I didn’t find, but the point here was to look quickly and to see what comes up in the first 100 Google offerings. It wasb’t always clear who runs these sites or what their motivations are. Here’s what floated to the top.

eCape
An interesting collection of thematic web sites, each with its own URL and slick graphics. Besides the tourism component (listed below) there are also business, real estate, shopping, auto and newsy sections – each with their own domain name. This was the only web site we saw advertised along the highway.
 

CapeCod.com
Locally owned portal site. Small classified ads section. Small photo
gallery. Dining, lodging and other listings draw from Yahoo Get Local.

Cape Cod Online
The best place if you only have time for one site. A service of Cape Cod Times out of Hyannis. Nicely designed with daily news and effective archive search. Good events calendar and classifieds. Superb community overview with easy-to-understand maps, town and school guides.

All Cape Cod
A "celebration" of cape cod. Some events in a handy calendar format.
Good number of outside links and works like a regional search engine. Small
town guide

Cape Cod Chamber
There are at least 20 chambers of commerce on the cape that you can search separately. This is a centralized chamber web site. Nice clickable accommodations lets you click on region, then on type of lodging. Top vacation planning buttons are too small and makes navigating confusing until you find them. Food events section and good for wedding and vacation planning.

Cape Cod Life
Cape Cod Magazine
Cape Cod Magazine and Cape Cod Life are great publications. The web sites, however, are merely an ad for the print publication. No other info.

Cape Code Travel
Created by the free "Best Read" advertising guides. There is a lot of
data here, but the web site takes a long time to reload. The click-down
menus can be confusing and obtrusive. Lots of links in Things To Do.

Virtual Cape Cod
Quick easy town guide for first-timers. Interesting feture on Thoreau’s
Cape Cod. Some good outside links, but not all are clickable. Search
box on home page is a good place to start.

Cape Links
Search for links town to town or category or use Word search box.

Cape Search
Good workable search engine with lots of data.

Cape Cod Search
And one more with what looks like a good database.

Click Cape Cod
I couldn’t figure this one out quickly. First click on your search
subject, then on a town, the instructions say, but my searches didn’t
turn up much.

Cape Cod Visitors Directory
An independent site, but with an interesting graphical homepage that is easy to understand. Visually the most appealing, but not always the deepest data.